Mouldy cream cheese

It occurs to me that the correct response to not being able to pull ideas together in a coherent manner is not, as I thought last night, to draw some pictures (or fail to draw in the case of that last picture) in MSPaint to make up for the fact that a piercing headache had rendered me unable to write in a pseudo-horror style but rather to possibly not actually write anything at all.

But then again there's not much fun in me not giving people the opportunity to point and laugh at me.

More cack-handed attempts at writing something in the future! Fuck yeah!

Cream cheese can be scary

I was going to title this with "making cream cheese sandwiches is hard" but remembered that I'd said that I wasn't going to do entries in that format. Or maybe I just said that I wasn't only going to do that. OK, so I could have carried that off, probably. Still, it's gone now and there's nothing I can do about it. Aside from change it.

So anyway.

There is not currently a lot in the house as regards full meals. There are plenty of store-cupboard things (spices, tomato purée, herbs, you get the idea) but not anything that creates a full meal. And I've just thought of something that I could have made.

So now I feel stupid. This whole situation could have been avoided if I'd just made some... hang on... oh yeah, I couldn't be bothered actually cooking, never mind.

Earlier when I was hungry I could not think of anything to make as a meal. I've been away for a few days and I really couldn't be bothered thinking too much about what I was going to eat. I wanted something easy. Now I've had a couple of fruit smoothies so my day has not purely featured chocolate and crisps (or chips as the more American amongst you might say) although they have featured up to a point. So I decided to do what any self-respecting lazy bastard who needed food quicker than someone could deliver pizza would do: I decided to make a sandwich. Not much of a reveal given that first paragraph but what the hell.

I decided upon a cream cheese with garlic and herbs sandwich with tomato purée as the only preparation with this was spreading. Nice and easy (no, not like me, thank you very much... I'm not nice). This rested on the cream cheese with garlic and herbs still being edible. The use by date mentioned some time in February but it had been open for a few days so I knew I had to check what was what.

I pulled off the lid and had a look inside at the contents and what I saw inside, at first glance, please be greatly. Everything was wonderful. My cheese was still fighting fit and ready to help deliver some starch in to my stomach. I approved of this development. I got my bread all ready, got the tomato purée squirted out on to one of the slices, and then decided to have another look at the cheese.

Upon looking a second time I was appalled to discover that what I had considered to be a perfectly safe and tasty contribution to my sandwichy plans had, in fact, nothing upon its mind but my death!

I was betrayed by mine own foodstuff!







Now I had to act fast. This mould, this monster, had clearly decided that only one of us could survive and, weak from hunger as I was, I was not going to let it defeat me.

This monster looked like the demented ghost of Jim Henson had created a newer, deadlier, Muppet and unleashed it upon me. I was aware of his ghostly arm operating this thing, ready to attack at any moment, as he hid his intangible form within my kitchen cupboard.




Uh... yeah... so I had an idea as to what that looked like but things didn't work out so well in MSPaint.

Hoo boy.

The action I took was to re-seal the plastic tub and consign the evil within to a bin-based eternity. Yeah, that'll show you, y'mouldy fucker!

So I had survived the attack with merely the insult to a fondly remembered part of my childhood (sorry Jim) to show as a scar but I did not have a sandwich just two slices of bread with one of them with a large squirt of tomato purée on it (no, I did not consider just having a tomato purée sandwich, not for long anyway) and I was fading fast. Handily I still had a small amount of Double Gloucester cheese and, as I was taking this out of the fridge, I noticed that I had a jar of pesto hanging around.

I ended up enjoying the cheese, tomato purée, and pesto sandwich far more than I would have enjoyed my previous plan.

I guess the moral of the story is that sometimes what we see as monsters are really just things that we don't understand. They seem scary at the time but maybe they're actually steering us in the right direction. Or maybe I just don't clear out my fridge often enough.

It is just so difficult to say.

Steampunks?

Steampunks really grind my gears.

I am a pedant

Again, this is not exactly news. Not only is this not news to anyone who knows me I think that it's pretty obvious from what I've written up to now that I am a difficult so-and-so (fuck yeah keeping it clean... wait... shit, never mind, dammit).

Anyhoo

The point being that a lot of things irritate me. And what better to do with one's irritations than get a grip and move on like a grown-up write about them on these here intertubes? Exactly. One of the things that irritates me is incorrect usage of apostrophes. This is not specific to me of course, indeed there are probably sites dedicated to very little else, but this example is particularly bad. It is particularly bad because it mixes up with another bugbear of mine which is incorrect pluralisation.

"But isn't all incorrect usage of apostrophes to do with incorrect pluralisation?" Some of you might wonder. Oh you dear thing, this is a whole other level of getting it wrong; here, I'll show you:

I apologise for the poor quality of image but we only had a 'phone camera and the light wasn't very good. It does, however, communicate the horror that is there.

You see that? "Panini's". Terrifying is it not?

Now this takes in a bit of Italian. A panino is an Italian bread roll. This is pluralised to panini. So I might have a panino, you might have a panino, so we would have panini. So even on a basic level of trying to add an "s" to this the entry on this pub's menu is woefully incorrect. But then they add an apostrophe? It's like they don't even care. About anything. How can you trust someone who treats language like that? It makes me sick. Sure this might seem like the kind of thing that could just be ignored but what then? Am I to turn a blind eye to violence? To warfare? No, standards much be maintained or we're just bloody savages.

The other thing that the pub in question (actually a rather good pub in general, very nice beers and cider, so I don't want to name it) does with its (oh you thought I might trip up there did you? Oh no, not me, no siree) menu is something that has been bugging my partner for years. I'd never really noticed before she pointed it out to me but now it really pisses me off. Which is good because I clearly needed more things that piss me off.

Yeah, that.

Again, I apologise for the poor picture quality ('phone camera, bad light, yadda yadda yadda) but again I am certain that you can see why this would make someone's blood boil. That's right: Suggesting that a Caesar Salad is vegetarian. Now, the salad in question may well be vegetarian, but then it would hardly be a "classic" example now would it? Not unless anchovies have been reclassified recently and I just haven't realised.

Now this one is a bit more serious than the former example as it impacts on people. I myself am not vegetarian but that does not mean that I approve of telling people that something that contains fish is vegetarian. This mistake is really rather unfair on people.

Pedantry isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes details are important.

Bet you didn't expect a serious and valid point at the end of all this did you? I must admit that I didn't see it coming either. Go figure.